An Old Bolshevik survivor who pressed the Soviet leadership toward de-Stalinization
When Mikoyan urged him to leave for Sochi, Snegov refused to go until his Party card was returned.
Alexei Snegov was an Old Bolshevik who had worked in the early Soviet party apparatus before fabricated charges during the Great Purge sent him to the Gulag for more than fifteen years. Released and rehabilitated in 1954, he became an adviser to Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan, bringing the leadership testimony about camp violence and the need to rehabilitate victims. Alongside Olga Shatunovskaya, he pressed Khrushchev to condemn Stalin and the cult of personality at the 20th Party Congress. He continued to advocate a deeper de-Stalinization, drawing surveillance and official attacks, and was briefly expelled from the Communist Party in 1967 before being reinstated.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1917Joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
- 1918–1921Worked in the underground party organizations of Vinnytsia and Podolia, then served as executive secretary of the Podolia Governorate committee
- 1930Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine
- 1931–1937Held party and political-sector posts in Transcaucasia, Irkutsk, Chelyabinsk, Chapayevsk and Murmansk
- 1937–1954Arrested in the Great Purge and spent more than fifteen years in the Gulag and exile
- 1954–1960After release and rehabilitation, headed the Gulag political department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs
- 1956Pressed for condemnation of Stalin and rehabilitation of victims around the 20th Party Congress
- 1967Briefly expelled from the Communist Party, then reinstated
Related historical events
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeGreat Purge prisonerArrested during the Great Purge, he spent more than fifteen years in the Gulag and exile.
- 1956.02The Twentieth Party Congress and the Secret SpeechAdviser who urged the secret speechAfter release he became an adviser to Khrushchev and Mikoyan and urged condemning Stalin at the congress.
Archival research and the open interventions of 1966-1967
Retiring in 1964 for reasons of age and health, Snegov did not stop working. As Sergei Mikoyan, the son of Anastas Mikoyan, later recalled, in retirement he worked on acute questions of the country's and the party's history, what was then called the liquidation of blank spots. He wrote articles, among them Stalin at the Sixth Party Congress, on Stalin's position in the summer of 1917 on Lenin's appearance before a court, and laboured in the archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism on a book whose working title was Stalin against Lenin, gathering instances of Stalin's duplicity toward Lenin. According to Mikoyan's son, Snegov was not a loose revisionist and would have been the first to object to that label; the charge against him was the refusal of unquestioning conformity. The research never reached print: Stalinists did everything to keep these studies from seeing the light.
The open intervention of 1966 was his defence of the historian Aleksandr Nekrich at the discussion of his book 1941, 22 June, held at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee's propaganda department. There Snegov, a personal pensioner, called the Soviet-German non-aggression pact a collusion with Hitler and a fourth partition of Poland and spoke bluntly of Stalin's apostasy from the revolution, and accused historians who tried to show Stalin's role objectively of still not having freed themselves from hypnosis. The Communist Party Control Committee report on that discussion singled out his speech, with those of Yevgeny Gnedin and Leonid Petrovsky, as especially vicious, and noted that he had made statements of the same kind earlier, in June 1964, during discussion of the draft ninth volume of the History of the USSR. The leadership took note. At the Politburo session of 10 November 1966 Mikhail Suslov raised the matter, calling him an extortionist, and Leonid Brezhnev pointed out that he was received in the Central Committee's departments and other ministries. In 1967 Snegov was expelled from the party for continuing to speak out about Stalin's crimes, and was reinstated the same year at the petition of a group of Old Bolsheviks. He remained under constant KGB surveillance, was sharply criticized in the press, and lost the possibility of publishing his historical and documentary research; that situation persisted until his death in 1989.